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PARTISAN REVIEW
(though attenuated by a synthetic process that makes Jean Barois both
a Peguy and a Renan) reproduce the rhythm, if not the individualistic
quality, of that period. It is in the best tradition of French pamphleteer–
ing that this mixture of uniquely French quarrels, of value-judgments
on science and religion in terms that have long since ceased to exist,
of moral issues above politics, and political issues beyond the reach
of morality, should have such an undiluted and sometimes immediate
fragrance.
Jean Barois' tortuous emancipation from Catholicism, his adula–
tion of science, and his subsequent degeneration as a rational being,
occupy the greater part of the novel, and as such, offer little interest, in
terms of ideas, except to collectors of the myths and mottos of nineteenth–
century free thought. Jean Barois is the Catholic son of an atheist doctor,
the traditional father-symbol of the free-thinking movement. His lib–
eration also goes by way of medicine. He begins by .questioning the truth
of the scriptures according to scientific and historical criteria, rejects the
"symbolist compromise," or interpretation, offered him, and finally ac–
cepts what is in effect a vulgarization of Renan's religion of science
and progress. He joins a group of young idealist atheists, synthetic
characters, like Woldsmuth, a Jewish chemist moved by suffering Jewry,
-a caricature of Bernard Lazare. All are followers of their elder, Luce,
who represents the "spirit of tolerance" in free thought, and who
serves, quite properly, to make of their
Dreyfusarisme,
not a rational
movement, but a romantic, idealised enterprise.
This group's polemic of participation in the Dreyfus case is the
real substance of Martin du Gard's novel. Barois, Luce, and the others,
collaborate in a periodical, "The Sower," (a metaphor, which, with its
affiliates, the grain, the furrow, the reaper, and even
La Semeuse
of
French bank notes, is currency of the period) a year after Dreyfus'
sentence to life imprisonment. Despite a five year error in chronology,
"The Sower" approximates Peguy's
Cahiers de la Quinzaine,
and its
collaborators, the first intellectual
Dreyfusards
in France.
The
Dreyfusards,
the group around Peguy, were partisans of what
Peguy himself called (after his conversion) the "republican mystique,"–
a romantic notion to which many of their own generation of intellectuals,
and a majority of the French people seemed indifferent. Unlike Jaures
and Herve, the so-called "anarchists" who denied that treason could
be
a crime, they were partisans of truth and justice in terms of the law of
the republic.
If
Jean Barois
has any interest today for American intellectuals it is
in the parallel between the state of the literary mind at the
tum
of
